


tethering

by Icestorm238



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Panic Attacks, Separation Anxiety, the result of a lot of emotions at midnight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-20 08:36:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22946149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icestorm238/pseuds/Icestorm238
Summary: Five and Ben, and relearning life.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Ben Hargreeves
Comments: 8
Kudos: 229





	tethering

Number Five: child superhero, deadly assassin. Currently sat outside, hovering somewhere on the slippery scale between mildly and moderately drunk, looking up at the headless statue of his ghost brother and debating the merits of pulling a Diego and going on a vigilante killing spree.

There’s a chill in the air today; winter is fast approaching. Five should probably have grabbed a coat on his way out. Oh well. The alcohol will keep him warm.

He’s forgone his favoured well-crafted martini for the simple bottle, drunk straight. It’s already half empty. He’s only been sitting out here for half an hour.

Five doesn’t have a problem. He  _ doesn’t. _

Diego and Luther are arguing again. They’re on one of the upper floors, and Five is on the ground, and he can almost make out what they’re saying. It’s oddly comforting - a strange constant in Five’s strange life.

He can’t hear anyone else even though he knows they’re all at the academy. No one else but Dolores, who isn’t, whispering into his ear, telling him to calm his paranoia, that he doesn’t need to go check on them.

It’d only take a second. He could be in and out in a flash.

The midday sun - the kind where it looks warm at a glance but is deceptively cold in reality - is streaming over the academy’s outer walls, painting Ben’s mutilated statue in hues of shifting light. The dying grass - they haven’t had a proper gardener in years, and the lawn is starting to suffer for it - is bronzed by its glow.

It’s perfectly idyllic, in the abnormal Hargreeves way. Five hates it. He also kind of loves it.

It’s a definite step up from the ashen rubble it had been reduced to in the apocalypse.

He’s feeling oddly… odd, today. Has been since the successful averting of the apocalypse, if he’s being honest with himself (and he’s terrible at being honest with himself, so as far as Five is concerned, it’s a new development). Nostalgic. Wistful. Vulnerable. Emotions he could not risk in the past, now making a comeback.

He often curls up in the garden with no company but alcohol or coffee or, in one moment of sheer genius, both. It’s not often he sits staring at Ben’s statue.

“What are you doing out here?” someone asks from right beside Five’s ear, shattering his tranquility, and he jumps.

Literally, jumps. He ends up a good few feet away, emerging from his portal in a fighting stance, landing tense, fists raised, already scoping the area for the best way to smash his bottle into a makeshift weapon.

Ben, coated in a faint blue sheen but as solid as he will ever be, hovering at an angle with his head perfectly level with the empty space where Five’s was, blinks.

“Oh.” Five uncoils, forcibly shutting down the plan he’d begun, sparing his bottle from a fate of being splintered and used as a shiv and saving the lawn from being fertilised by the remaining alcohol. “Ben.”

Five’s first instinct is to scan for Klaus - because there is no Ben anymore, and there is no Klaus, only BenAndKlaus or KlausAndBen. They are a package deal, a buy-one-get-one-lumped-in-no-returns.

Klaus isn’t here. Ben is alone. This in itself is more surprising than Ben sneaking up on him.

“Uh, hi.” Ben offers a weak wave. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Five huffs, and resettles himself on the ground. He carefully compresses the churning in his gut at having shown weakness  _ because weakness is wrong, weakness gets you killed  _ \- this is Ben, this is family, if he can’t show weakness in front of family, then when can he? (He’s trying, okay? they all are).

His brother wanders over, seemingly hesitant, and sits beside him. Fingers that shimmer if Five fixates on them run through the decaying grass that’s more alive than Ben is, tugging at it in fits - Ben does that a lot, touching everything he can until Klaus can keep him corporeal no longer. He eyes Five’s bottle but doesn’t comment. “Hi,” he says again.

Five bites back his instinctive sarcastic response. He’s sat through enough family meetings about being kinder to each other to be nice just to avoid another. Besides, this is Ben. They all have a soft spot for Ben. “Hi,” is what he does say, though his fingers clench around the bottle. “No Klaus?”

“No,” Ben hums. “No Klaus. He’s inside.”

This is oddly stilted, for Ben. That’s another thing about this brother - he will talk and talk and talk when he knows the others can hear him, like he’s making up for all the time he spent going unheard, like it’s all built up during those years and now the dam is broken and the words can’t be stopped.

Not this time. This time, Ben clams up, which is much more familiar to Five, much more like the Ben he remembers from their childhood.

Most of Five’s siblings had been too annoying to willingly spend extended periods of time with. Too loud, too distracting. Ben was one of the few exceptions. Five couldn’t remember how many times they’d ended up in the same room, working in silence, alone but not lonely because the other was there.

Sometimes Five would jump to Ben’s room without warning and settle himself in the corner with a stack of books and a higher stack of paper. Not once did Ben complain - he’d usually grab a book for himself and curl up on his bed.

Those peaceful snapshots had been just one more thing for Five to miss.

The current silence isn’t the comfortable, easy silence from back then. It’s awkward as fuck.

It’s falling on Five to keep the conversation going, isn’t it? Wonderful.

Five jiggles his bottle, studies its remaining contents, and takes a preparatory swig. He fought so hard to get back; he refuses to not try now he’s succeeded. “Not like you two to be apart. Why do you struggle so much with being separated, anyway?” he asks once he’s swallowed.

Blunt? Yes. Effective? Remains to be seen.

“Wow, Five,” Ben drawls after a moment of open-mouthed offence. “You can just ask your poor, deceased brother why he has separation anxiety from what was his only tether to the mortal coil.”

Huh. Fair enough.

“He’s not your only tether any more,” Five prods, because his thirteen-year-old body isn’t as good at handling alcohol as his fifty-eight-year-old one was, and the buzz is starting to hit his brain and cloud his judgement. He relishes it. Hates it. Succumbs to it. “Look at you now: Klaus isn’t out here with us, and yet here we are.”

Klaus - Klaus’ powers - is the only reason Ben can be out here, visible, tangible, in the first place, but that fact doesn’t serve Five’s argument, so he omits it.

Ben doesn’t call him out on it. He just grimaces. “And I want to throw up. Probably would, if I wasn’t, you know.” He gestures to his incorporeal body - Five can see the wilting flowers through his chest if he squints, the browning edges of the petals tinted blue by Ben’s glow. “No offence, but all I want to do right now is run back inside to Klaus.”

“None taken,” Five huffs, ignoring the twinge of offence tugging at his gut. Forty-five years fighting to get back to a brother who chooses Klaus, of all their siblings, over him. Great.

He’s not jealous. He’s just mildly drunk. He’s fine.

He does get it, he does! Ben has spent well over a decade with only Klaus for company, of course the two of them have formed a bond not easily shattered now that Klaus is sober and Ben can interact with the others again.

It’s like his own relationship with Dolores: decades with only each other for company, just like Klaus and Ben. He gets it.

He swallows his dumb, irrational feelings with another gulp of vodka. “So why are you out here with me when you could be in there with him?”

The first time they’d tried separating Klaus and Ben had also been the last. Five had been assigned to accompanying Ben up the stairs, and was rewarded with front row seats to Ben’s resulting panic attack. His brother had collapsed into a sobbing wreck within minutes, and Klaus’ powers had crapped out before Five and Vanya and Luther could do anything to help. Five had jumped back downstairs to find Klaus just as distressed. It had been, in short, disastrous.

Now that he thinks about it, Ben’s breathing is all wrong - harsh and thick and forced. He doesn’t even need to breathe. It’s something Five would have picked up on instantly were he sober. Now that he has, it serves as a marker of Ben’s concealed panic, albeit one realised late.

Ben takes a slow, even, calming breath, then relapses into his strained rhythm. “We have to be apart sometimes,” he says. His hands clench - one into the fabric of his hoodie, the other into the tortured grass beneath him. “I love him and he loves me, but there have been times when I’ve been desperate for some space, and I know he’s felt the same. We’ve been doing this occasionally. Him in his room, me in the corridor. Nothing too strenuous. This is the furthest apart we’ve tried.”

“And I’m the distraction,” Five deduces. He drinks again.

“You’re doing great,” Ben says flatly. “Interrogating me on the exact topic I’m trying not to think about right now. Very helpful.”

Five rolls his eyes. “Could’ve given me some warning. I’m not omniscient.”

His mind is whirling as he speaks. He hadn’t noticed Klaus and Ben trying to split. How hadn’t he noticed?

(Probably because, more than half of the time, Ben is invisible to all but Klaus. How is Five meant to know whether he’s in the room or not?)

(Probably because the house is huge, and they’ve been doing it when they’re sure they’re alone. Klaus’ hands flaring bright blue would’ve been a bit of a giveaway.)

(Probably because, without a distant family to get back to, without an apocalypse to avert, Five has very little to do but drink. His brain, smart as it is, hasn’t exactly been functioning at full capacity the past few weeks.)

Ben smiles. It doesn’t meet his eyes - eyes which keep darting to the door, which Klaus is most likely behind, how did Five not notice sooner. “Sorry.”

He falls quiet, and Five lets that quiet stretch until he remembers that he’s been designated as the distraction, for some ungodly reason, and he’ll be damned if he spent forty-five years fighting his way back only to abandon his family when they need him most, so he blurts out, “But I can cope with being away from Dolores. I don’t understand why it’s this bad for you. At panic attack levels of bad, I mean.”

And that- that’s not helping, that’s the opposite of helping, well done, Five. He shoots a look of disgust at his almost-drained bottle. He really is losing his edge.

His logic, while perfectly connected within his head, has clearly skipped a step or two for Ben, who frowns at him in a way that makes Five ache for their childhood, when he’d see Ben aim that expression at a sibling, or a maths problem, or a book.

He’s missed the little things like that.

“When I’m away from Klaus,” Ben says slowly, “I’m afraid I won’t ever find my way back.”

“Oh,” says Five, with all the eloquence of his fifty-eight years.

“If I don’t have Klaus then I have nothing. No connection to the world. I’ve spent years making comments that no one could hear, and the only thing that gave me purpose was knowing that he could, that he appreciated my presence, that I had some reason to continue existing. Without him - no impact, no relevance. Nothing.”

“Oh.”

“When he disappeared to Vietnam… it was only a few minutes on my end, but he was gone. We’d never been apart, not since I died. I thought- I was afraid he would never come back. I thought I was alone. I know it’s selfish, but I was almost more scared for myself than I was for him. Maybe I was more scared. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve died.”

Five is starting to feel like a broken record. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

His eyes are shining. Ben had always been the crier of the family - it’s good to see some things haven’t changed. Five would really prefer he didn’t cry right now, though.

Distraction. Distract. Better than the last distraction, please, it shouldn’t be this hard. If he can survive the apocalypse, he can handle a distressed sibling.

“I come sit out here when I want to stop.”

Well. That wasn’t what he’d meant to say.

Ben’s gaze darts to meet his, and shit, he has to carry on now, doesn’t he?

He really has to cut back on the drinking.

“In the apocalypse, I couldn’t stop.” It’s only the alcohol that’s loosened his tongue enough to say this - he would never dream of voicing his thoughts otherwise (it’s nothing to do with how Ben has just opened up to him, he isn’t feeling an obligation to open up in return, and the voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Dolores needs to stop telling him otherwise). “If I stopped planning then I would die. I had to be alert all the time. I had to distract myself from the hunger and the thirst because I only had so many supplies, and boredom made me more likely to waste them. Boredom made me more likely to lose myself in all that I’d lost.”

“Oh,” says Ben.

“With the Commission, I didn’t have the time,” Five continues. He’s aware of the irony: the Commission had all the time in the world. Technically, so had Five. “I wanted to get back as soon as possible, and I needed to succeed before they caught on. Besides, if I stopped, I’d have to actually think about what I was doing. All the killing. It was easier to not think.”

“Oh.”

“Now I can stop. There’s no fight for survival, no impending doom. Just life. A life that will stretch on much longer than it should,” thanks time travel, thanks accidental de-aging, “and with no distractions to fill it. Out here, in this garden, when it’s quiet, I can hear you guys inside. I can hear people talking and fighting and living on the street. Existing. It’s nice to sit and take it all in. Remember that I’m back with my family, and not in imminent danger, and can actually live this life of mine in peace. It’s nice to remember that I’m alive.”

“Oh.”

“So, uh. Yeah.”

God, they’re a useless pair. A useless family of useless idiots who were never taught how to talk about their feelings like normal people. Thanks, dad.

Five can’t remember the last time he exposed so much of his mind. Can’t remember if he ever has to someone that isn’t Dolores. He blames the alcohol.

They’re quiet again, the heavy, oppressive sort of quiet. They’ve both just shared their emotions - an exceptionally rare occurrence in the Hargreeves household - and neither has any idea what to say in response. Five is handling this spectacularly.

“You’re relearning life,” Ben murmurs, saving Five from the responsibility of breaking the silence. “So am I.”

“You’re dead,” Five points out rather uselessly. “I’ve never stopped living.”

That’s not exactly true, though, and the quirked eyebrow Ben shoots him is a wordless call out. Five just finished explaining how, up until now, he’s spent his life surviving, and how it’s only now he’s been gifted the time to slow down and live it.

And Ben’s been around, but not in full. He can finally impact the world again after years as a helpless spectator. This is the closest he’ll ever get to living again.

He doesn’t verbally retract what he’s said. “There are so many little things I’ve forgotten,” he admits instead with a sigh, as if his soul hasn’t been bared enough already today.

Ben takes it for what it is. “I keep walking into walls,” he grins, opening up in turn. Five’s watched him do it enough times to already know, but he lets Ben continue as if he didn’t. “Keep making rude comments and forgetting that everyone can hear.”

Five’s been on the receiving end of a few of those. He still distinctly remembers the entire family collapsing into hysterical laughter as Ben insulted his height, his appearance, and his coffee addiction, all in quick succession, somehow not realising that the laughter was caused by him.

“I don’t really know what to do without an apocalypse.”

The admission is bitter on his tongue.

“It drove my life for so long. Now I just feel empty.”

“I get it,” Ben says. “Well, no, I don’t. I could never understand what you went through. But the singular driving force - that I can understand. For me, it’s been Klaus. Watching over him, trying to keep him sane and healthy and alive. And now he’s getting sober, after I spent so long trying and failing to convince him. Now he has a support network, one that can actually stop him instead of standing uselessly on the sidelines. Now-” he breaks off, nods in a way that’s both sad and resigned and makes Five’s cold heart ache. “Now I’m afraid he doesn’t need me any more.”

“You’ve been together so long,” Five says. “You can’t undo that. He’ll always need you, and you’ll always need him.”

It occurs to Five as he says it that it’s not the most helpful, given that Ben and Klaus are trying to lessen their separation anxiety, not strengthen it, but it’s comforting.

At least, he hopes it’s comforting.

Ben seems comforted. He smiles and it meets his eyes. “I hope so.”

Once again they fall quiet, and- oh, this is the quiet Five reminisces about so fondly. The companionable silence brand of quiet. The Five and Ben Quiet™.

He’s missed this. He’s missed Ben. He’s missed so much.

“I’ve always hated it,” Ben says suddenly. Death, ghosthood, being stuck with Klaus, the Umbrella Academy, his powers - that’s where Five’s mind jumps to, but when he turns to look at his brother, Ben is staring up at his statue.

Five can’t help it: he snorts. Drinks. “I’ve always hated my portrait.”

He’s only known it existed for a month or so, but still.

“It’s so unnecessary,” Ben continues. “So impersonal.”

“Pretentious,” Five agrees. “Ugly.”

“Like if dad had put a plaster on my injury and said he’d done all he could. That’s how much he cared.”

Five puts his bottle down, runs a finger along its neck. “Was it that bad?”

And just like that, Ben won’t meet his eyes. “It wasn’t pretty.”

He’d wondered, before he’d stumbled across Vanya’s book, where his last two siblings were. He’d scrambled through the ruins of their home searching for their bodies, thinking they must be with the others, because Five had been thirteen and naïve and the idea of the family splitting up hadn’t occurred to him. Vanya’s absence hadn’t made sense until he lived through that timeline himself; Ben had clicked as soon as read the book’s contents and saw he had a chapter all to himself.

Somehow, that distant death had hurt more than the corpses right in front of him.

The thought that, if Five had been there, then maybe, just maybe-

“I’m sorry,” he says, instead of adding any more baggage to a conversation that’s already fully laden. “It doesn’t help, I know, but I’m sorry you died. I wish you hadn’t.”

“Funnily enough, I get that a lot.”

God, he’s missed Ben. He’s missed all his siblings - everything he’d done had been to get back to them, after all - but the knowledge that Ben had died separately, so young, alone - it had made Five feel that loss much more keenly. Returning to Luther and Diego and Allison and Klaus and Vanya and a gaping hole instead of Ben had hit even harder.

He’d been unable to save Ben. All he could do was pour all his energy into saving the others.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, his mind buzzing with alcohol and grief and general idiocy. “I-”

Five cuts off. He’s talking to the air.

Ben is gone and Klaus is barrelling out of the door, shattering the moment that had built up between them.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Klaus is stammering as he approaches. His hands are trembling; he looks like he’s about to collapse. “That’s enough of that. How are you?” A pause. “Good. I’m okay. I’m actually feeling pretty atrocious if I’m being honest, but if you want a polite, non-committal answer then I’m okay. Hi Five. I need to crash- no, I need to get high, or drunk, or ideally both, but since those aren’t options, a nice long nap will have to suffice. Let’s go? Yeah, okay. Bye Five. Ben says thanks. Don’t ask me what for.”

And just like that, Klaus is gone too. Five raises a hand to wave, then aborts the action as he registers the futility. “Huh,” he says to Ben’s decapitated statue for lack of a better conversation partner. “That happened.”

He leaves the bottle where it is, not quite emptied, and teleports to the kitchen. He ignores the call of the bar upstairs to kickstart the coffee machine he’d fought tooth and nail to convince his family was a necessary purchase. There’s a stash of the good stuff hidden in the highest, most hidden corner, where only he can reach - within seconds he’s grabbed a packet and shoved it in. Allison and Vanya are talking in a neighbouring room - well, Vanya’s doing most of the talking, but Allison’s able to say more with each passing day. Mom is humming to herself somewhere close by. No one comes in to see him, so he grabs his drink and jumps to his room.

From his new location, Diego and Luther’s argument (still going, what a surprise) is much louder, and is almost loud enough to drown out Klaus’ not-so-one-sided conversation from his room down the hall. Pogo’s useless attempts to calm his brothers down is enough to bring a small smile to Five’s face, although he’d deny it if anyone walked in and saw.

His family are all here. They’re all alive (or as alive as they can be, given that one is a robot and one is a ghost, but in their own ways, they are both as alive as the rest of them). They’re all safe.

Five is here. Five is alive. Five is safe.

He downs his coffee far too quickly to be healthy, slumps onto his bed, and is content to lie, unmoving, and simply exist.


End file.
